Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @05:47PM
from the laptop-hugging dept.

gollum123 writes to tell us that according to a recent list compiled by Greenpeace, Lenovo has topped the list of "eco-friendly" companies scoring an 8 out of a possible 10 while Apple fell to the bottom of the list with only a 2.7. "Iza Kruszewska, Greenpeace international toxics campaigner, said the industry had made some positive steps in the last 12 months with firms starting to act rather than just issue statements of intent. Of the 14 companies profiled, said Ms Kruszewska, nine now score more than five out of 10."

You'll get modded down for defending an essentially useless "report" for the sake of trolling for Apple supporters.
Everything Greenpeace does is designed to generate press for Greenpeace to boost donations. EPEAT's ranking, using real world metrics and not the nonsense Greenpeace invented, reverse Greenpeace's findings. Is the US EPA now an Apple "fanboy" as well?

Absolutely 100% correct! Greenpeace has very little credibility in most subjects. They have considerable history with manipulating data to suit their fund raising profile, and have been caught doing on a number of occasions - Bret Spar is one example, though others can be found easily . Remember Greenpeace is NOT a charity. Historically, they have provably lied to make money.

Environmental economics was the subject I studied at university; I have undertaken environmental assessments in the field..To perform a fair, accurate and precise assessment of a company's environmental impact requires weeks, if not months, of intensive on-site research and measurement. It requires full access to all processes within the company, and access to privileged information.

There is no way Greenpeace has access to this information. A true and fair assessment cannot be done externally. This is a fund raising publicity stunt and absolutely nothing more. It has no credible science or economics behind it whatsoever.

Greenpeace's claims have been analyzed in this BusinessWeek article [businessweek.com] and in a series of articles at roughlydrafted.com [roughlydrafted.com]. One conclusion both sources make is that Greenpeace applies different criteria to different companies and seems to be targeting Apple due to the company's visibility.

This report generated quite a buzz in the green blogosphere when it was released (last year). There are some [treehugger.com] serious [roughlydrafted.com] questions [temasactuales.com] about the validity of the report.

"Apple finally came around to a limited recycling program in the US, but they can do better."

This is worded as if it just happened recently. Except that the US (and Japan) take-back program startedup in 2002. (Announced in 2001) It includes not only recycling of its own computers, but also othervendor's computers and monitors. I wonder which way they consider this to be "limited"?

The images at the top of the Greenpeace site show Chinese children holding color iMac keyboards datingbefore 2000.... before recycling programs in the US and Asia actually existed.

The page is designed to get Apple to do two things:
* Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
* Offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.

The question here is, is it reasonable to persecute Apple for not meeting an arbitrarily set "worst toxic chemicals" goal? And I say this because "worst toxic chemicals" is fairly ambiguous.They recycle plastics, foam, paper and whatnot from their products, they follow a number of environmental standards in the US and Europe and maintain their own.

The C7, while requiring a fan for the highest CPU speeds, goes up to 2.0GHz and uses 20W at full tilt, max.

That 2.0GHz, isn't remotely comparable with an Intel or AMD 2GHz CPU. Indeed, I'd expect it to perform less than half as fast as you might expect from that rating... Much worse than even a 2.0GHz Pentium 4...

For a high-performance system, I'd suggest a Turion... $80 on newegg for a 25W MAX, 2.0GHz AMD CPU, that will work in many cheap and available socket 754 motherboards. Not to mention that Cool'n'Quiet should give much lower idle power usage than anything VIA has to offer.

For miniITX systems, look for Geode CPUs. I see several on eBay regularly, and occasionally a few on pricewatch. For $200, you can get everything but the case, PSU, and HDD, and with a Geode NX CPU, that will smoke the fastest VIA CPUs, and still be lower power. Older "Mobile Athlons" will also work quite well, but expect the Geodes to be lower power, easier to get, and inexpensive.

More expensive, but equally good, are Intel's low power "ULV" CPUs, but good luck finding a miniITX motherboard for any of them.

The Macbook (and around 70% of all other portables) is made by Taiwanese company Quanta Computing [engadget.com] along with your iPod [appleinsider.com]. Apple products are about as American-made as Grass Jelly [wikipedia.org].

Actually, GP might as well not buy anything. There's so much stuff that's made in China these days, and even if the product as a whole isn't, numerous parts are. And even if not that, the same companies have business interests in China. Hell, if GP is living in the US, it's time to leave. The US government owes the Chinese government a lot of money...

Fact of the matter is, China is not a communist regime. It's a not-quite-so benevolent dictatorship. However, dictatorships (and all governments for that matter) can only survive when there's order in the realm, and when there's actually people in the realm. An unstable environment unstablizes governments. Look at the aftermath of Katrina. If a disaster of that magnitude were to hit the rest of the US all at once, the US government itself would be destroyed in the process, likely replaced by a military dictatorship or facist state (as if it isn't happening already...). China realizes this, and all the environment-friendly policies these past few years works towards this end.